DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

I attended a presentation by two of the lead systems geeks from Google last night. The content dipped below my threshhold of interest when it got into the minutiae of their net-booting protocols, and we nearly throttled one guy who kept asking questions that were way too detailed to be of general interest (especially when it became evident that the guy asking questions had no idea what he was talking about).

Google is hosted on 10,000 Linux servers, most of which are half-depth 1U devices from rackable.com (no link — I thereby spare you the pain you’d feel from rackable’s awful Flash-based website). Each host has 2 Maxtor 40- or 80-gb IDE (!) drives accessed primarily via DMA. They didn’t use SCSI because it’s too expensive, and they can get comparable performance with DMA/IDE. Surprising!

Their web index and cache is replicated across many servers, meaning that a single “database server” has only a tiny fraction of the entire index available within local hardware. This is fascinating, and I guess it’s the heart of their scaling technology — to be able to break down a single index across many servers and query this cluster quickly and effectively.

Many of these architectural details are contained in this article: Google Defies Dotcom Downturn

In a humorous twist, Google presented attendees with Google-branded boxer shorts emblazoned with their appropriate and familiar slogan “I’m Feeling Lucky.”